You're invited to join us for a talk by Raffaella Sadun, the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School:

"Management and Reskilling in the Age of GenAI”

📅 Thursday 12 February | 🕐 18:00 - 19:30 followed by cocktail reception |

📍 IESE North Campus, Aula Magna

In this talk, Professor Sadun will address:

• The evidence that GenAI can generate real productivity gains at the task level,  and why that's only the beginning of the story.

• Why the reorganizing work, not just adopting technology, is the key factor for scaling AI productively.

• The adjustment costs that workers face in adapting, and how firm investments in training and management quality can reduce them.

• What policymakers can do to support experimentation infrastructure, reward firms that invest in discovering human-AI complementarities, and guard against displacement.

For two decades, Professor Sadun has been asking a deceptively simple question: why do some organizations get so much more out of their people and technologies than others?

Through the World Management Survey, a large research project she co-founded spanning to date 35 countries and over 20,000 managers, she and her collaborators have documented something surprising: vast differences in basic management practices persist across firms, and these differences account for roughly a quarter to a third of cross-country and within-country productivity gaps. This matters enormously for AI.

In her early work, Sadun and her co-authors showed that US multinationals consistently extracted more productivity from information technology than their European counterparts, not because of better technology, but because of better "people management" practices. The same pattern is emerging with GenAI: organizations that lack the managerial infrastructure to reorganize work will struggle to capture its value, regardless of how much they invest in the technology itself.

At the Digital Reskilling Lab at HBS, where Professor Sadun serves as co-principal investigator, she's now studying what it actually takes to help workers adapt. Her recent working paper, "Training Within Firms" (2025), uses data from three large organizations to show that middle managers, not senior leadership, not HR, are often the key to whether employees engage with reskilling opportunities. Middle managers who actively engage with employees and emphasize their development are associated with significantly higher training participation and performance, especially during periods of organizational change.

Her 2023 HBR Prize-winning article, "Reskilling in the Age of AI," identified five paradigm shifts that companies must embrace: treating reskilling as a strategic imperative, making it every leader's responsibility, approaching it as change management, connecting it to employee purpose, and building ecosystems of support.

Join us for this exciting event!

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Dr. Raffaella Sadun is the Charles E. Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Professor Sadun received her PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.  At HBS, she is a Co-Chair of the Project on Managing the Future of Work and the co-director of the Digital Reskilling Lab, where she studies the effectiveness of large-scale digital training investments made in private and public sector organizations. She also serves as director of the of the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Group in Organizational Economics. Her research focuses on managerial and organizational drivers of productivity and growth in corporations and the public sector.  Her work has helped uncover the extent to which the diffusion of “basic” management and organizational practices varies across organizations within and across countries, and how this affects productivity at the micro and macro level.

Sadun is the author of articles published in journals such as The Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, and Journal of Political Economy, and was recognized for the best article published on the Harvard Business Review in 2018 and 2023. She co-founded several large-scale projects to measure management practices and managerial behavior in organizations, such as the World Management Survey, the Executive Time Use Study, and the first large scale management survey in hospitals, MOPS-H, conducted in partnership with the US Census Bureau. She received the honor of Grande Ufficiale dell'Ordine "Al Merito della Repubblica Italiana," the highest-ranking order awarded by the President of the Italian Republic for “merit acquired by the nation” in 2021. In 2022 she was awarded the Prize “Fondazione de Sanctis per le Scienze Economiche.”  

This event is organized by IESE's Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Management Initiative.